EARTH ~

APPROACH


I’ve only been away one day

But already between the width

Of the stone wall gate

Spans the thinnest first strand of

A spider’s web, floating there

As the river fog this morning

In the valley — well enough to

Stoop beneath it,

Cause no harm.







© Bob Arnold
from Where Rivers Meet
(Mad River Press)


photo & stonework © bob arnold

EARTH ~

POEM: pomegrante / fruit of brides



pomegranate
fruit of brides


melon
fruit of marriages


concentric fruit
hard-soft fruit
fruit of seeding & dying in union


I knew a man whom death was mushing
who liked nothing better than a melon


choosing or eating
he stroked the rumps
sounded them with his finger


melons & melons
were carried in the sun
before his bones turned slush
carried each like a babe
wrapped in papers to keep cool


& ate we ate
salt nubbles
juice on wood
swimming with flies in the stain
casting cool rind to patient dogs


careful
don't drop the baby


the old dog
waddles off
tusks of rind
from his jaw


pomegranate
fruit of brides





PAMELA MILLWARD
from The Route of the Phoebe Snow
(Coyote 1966)

PAMELA MILLWARD WAS FIRST SEEN IN COYOTE'S JOURNAL (SPEAKING FOR MYSELF), AND LATER IN HER NOVEL MOTHER (FOUR SEASONS FOUNDATION).

REASON ~

Lanny Friedlander

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/us/07friedlander.html?ref=obituaries









reason.com

EARTH ~

Mary McCaslin

When I fell in love with you know who, there was no one we played more in our cabin in the woods, besides Townes Van Zandt, than Mary McCaslin. Old record player. Repeatedly. And I believe we wore through both our separate albums of Way Out West and so bought one more out of the dollar bin. And years later when our son Carson was born, we bought him a copy.


No man should go on living without the young voice of Mary McCaslin rushing through his veins.


She was completely outside Nashville, recorded in the sticks of Vermont, born in the midwest but with a Pike's Peak knowledge of the old west. More than just the history, places, events and people; she put you there.


Mary McCaslin still tours and plays. Thirty years ago in Seattle walking with a friend on a barren side street we saw a marquee for Mary McCaslin with her then companion Jim Ringer. Their duets rival anyone's.


We never saw them together. We heard Ringer long ago in Vermont, a wee bit inebriated on stage and making fun of his dobro player (who played fine). And then we caught McCaslin years and years later on a wet night in a college town cafe, and miraculously here MM was passing through.


Her first album Way Out West remains eerily stark yet rippling with passions, and absolutely untouched.


Here we share a terrific Marty Robbins song from her album Prairie in the Sky
done all Mary ~

"my love" from the album Prairie in the Sky
philo records

PRICELESS ~

memerial.net/2335-anything-else

GERONIMO ~

democracy now

EARTH ~

Hettie Jones

Hard Drive



Saturday the stuffed bears were up again
over the Major Deegan
dancing in plastic along the bridge rail
under a sky half misty, half blue
and there were white clouds
blowing in from the west


which would have been enough
for one used to pleasure
in small doses


But then later, at sunset
driving north along the Saw Mill
in a high wind, with clouds big and drifting
above the road like animals
proud of their pink underbellies,
in a moment of intense light
I saw an Edward Hopper house,
at once so exquisitely light and dark
that I cried, all the way up Route 22
those uncontrollable tears
"as though the body were crying"


and so young women
here's the dilemma


itself the solution:


I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction





from Drive
(Hanging Loose Press, 1998)

HETTIE JONES HAS BEEN POET, TEACHER (SCHOOLS & PRISONS), EDITOR, PUBLISHER. MOTHER, LOVER LONGER THAN MOST CAN REMEMBER. DRIVE IS HER FIRST FULL COLLECTION OF POEMS AND HOW I BECAME HETTIE JONES IS HER MEMOIR. HER MANY BOOKS FOR CHILDREN ARE VERY WELL KNOWN.




photo : nymag.com

EARTH ~

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

As we have seen, Céline favored no class. He felt politicians misused their power, the wealthy exploited the system, intellectuals became lost in obscurantism, the bourgeois sought only to become wealthy. Despite his basic pity for the poor, they did not escape his censure for they were human, that is to say both ignorant and abject. He found the masses to be galley slaves, good for lashings and sweat. We are the minions of good King Wretchedness. "Against the abomination of living in poverty, we must, let's admit it, it's our duty, become drunk with something, wine, the cheap kind, masturbation or movies." At least that would offer a bit of the "delirium of the soul" Céline described in his novels and perhaps felt in his life. Out of all the dreams and miracles we can choose those that best "warm our soul."


Céline felt traditional moral and religious values were suspect; people were misled by prudish, deluded by false promises, invalid hopes and habits. He felt, for instance, as Almeras noted, physical sexuality was not obscene, but the concept of "love foreverness" was both an obscenity and a lie. It was his painfully human task to strip man's mask from his comfortable illusions, to speak out with vigor and clarity. He used one favorite image to describe his role in life, as the lead husky for an Arctic dog sled. Upon his sharpness of eye, his instinct for danger — a snow covered crevice, thin ice, a potential avalanche — rested the safety of all. His baying, loud and prompt, gave the warning note. In similar fashion Céline the writer warned of poverty, impending war, an Apocalypse, not with a murmur or a "by the way" (no equivocal would suffice), but with a howl to shatter the welkin: clear and meaning, heard by all, fulfilling his role as guide and crier.


Céline seemed to enjoy antagonizing his readers. After all, such an attitude aroused the public and sold books. Perhaps that was the price he was willing to pay. But not only did it sell books, it stirred up the country and impelled critics to offer their condemnation or to risk their approval of this rigorously independent writer, this literary anarchist. Many responded, each in his own way. Some found the author boring, obscene, immoral; others found him absorbing, refreshing, honest. To a few critics he was a mixture of all. He was compared to Swift as a parodist, to Zola as an observer, to Artaud, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Kafka, and the surrealists for defining himself through his style, to Pascal for his vision of solitude, to Rabelais for his boisterousness — albeit black rather than jovial. His style was described alternately as a breath of fresh air, a rancid effluvium, a fresco of satire. It was at once mean and gross with flashes of dignity, cynically sincere, a net in which human emotions were caught, an appropriate form with which to discuss the stench of human wretchedness. Impoverished in syntax, it was a rejection of formalism. "Not till Céline arrived," observed Marcel Ayme, "did we notice that French grammar was wearing a high collar, heavily starched." Both Céline's style and his person were " of the people."


For his pessimism, Hayman called him "the black magician of hilarity and rage," and P. H. Simon wrote that Céline would not "sugar-coat the pill." His world lived in abject wretchedness, Fowlie feels Céline was first to announce "the exclusive theme in contemporary literature: the absurdity of human life." Céline's humor reflected its source: Tyczka described his comedy as "a sadistic raillery of ugliness and decay," Tanguy calls him "a wolf of black humor, a catharsis for our time," and Godard sees him as moving from gag to satire to black humor, able to "laugh at the intolerable." In the same vein, Vitoux claims that Céline's words are to the wretchedness he describes as a remedy is to disease. His comedy, though rooted in despair, is irrepressible, outrageous, truculent, brutal, honest and cathartic.


These were the qualities that heavily influenced that course of literature in the twentieth century: despair, absurdity and the need for a new morality. Many writers were directly affected by Céline and acknowledged this indebtedness in their writing. Among them were Sartre, Queneau, Nimier, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs and the Beat Generation. In France a large number of writers tried to imitate Céline's seemingly effortless style in order "to make a buck." As he put it, but discovered the task was next to impossible. A slavish imitation of his style was inevitably superficial, A few such as Renzo Bianchini showed similar passions and moods, but even they fell short of matching his gueule. The power of oral language that was uniquely Céline's.

~ Stanford Luce, from the introduction to Conversations with Professor Y
( Dalkey Archive, 2006 )

EARTH ~

James Laughlin

WHERE IS THE COUNTRY



We were always searching for

That happy country we read about

In books when we were young?

Once we thought we'd found it,

And for a time we visited there,

But then we knew we'd been deceived;

It was not the dreamed-of country.

Or had we just deceived ourselves?

In making the choice of each other

Had we destroyed the happy land?







from Phantoms
(Aperture 1994)

James Laughlin, poet, often blended the spirit of the Latin poets with his own knack for colloquial speech, was the publisher of New Directions books since 1936. A delightful man of letters in his many faceted memoirs ~ often published as essays and autobiography ~ he may be best known outside of publishing for his lyrical and candid love poems.



photo:new directions

EARTH ~

Today, even the very best, are only working for themselves. They pal with those that they recognize in themselves, publish cronies, invite what appeals to themselves. Zero wonder. Zero chance. Zero invention, and it shows everywhere. Obama still shows at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night he can ridicule with decency and include himself in an unflattering portrait. And at the very same hour, know Bin Laden has been targeted and is about to be snuffed out. Navy Seals. Head shot. We live in systematic murder. Ordered by the President of the United States, the guy joking. And a few days before all of this, he was being insulted left and right by high powered clowns with a feeding-frenzy media attention. Racists every one of them; and still the man laughs, orders a killing, orders the burial of the killing in the North Arabian Sea. Yes? No? Maybe? Who cares? In the sphere of the usual day now: jobs, travel, debt, sorrow, loss, indifference; a simple bird call might shatter your spine. No novelist, except maybe Burroughs, had this blueprint down before today with quite the same gristle and devil may care. And brilliant as he was, it's ugly after all. Merely genius darkly philosophizing. Lots and lots and lots of angry men out there. Before any of that, was floral or even ice, morning and night, planetary, and a pair of eyes each day awakening.





barred owl, western USA

MAY DAY ~

"...I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?"

BIX BEIDERBECKE

CHEERS TO MAY DAY FOR EVERYONE!

24 degrees this morning at 6AM., and DSL is down. I see Sweetheart out in red parka with the field and Cutie Pie transfixed, as always, with moving water. We've had moving water everywhere this spring around the world. In many places deeply tragic, even murderous. Here it's snow melt, spring declaring, woodlands running streams. We've been hiking over water and in with water every day on our hikes in the woodlot. For two months in our roads of travel. The cord of cut or split maple I thought we'd have carried down by hand from the woodlot come April Fool's wasn't kidding. We're still bringing it home in canvas sacks on May Day. Good thing too with the weather holding a chilled edge. By noon some days have us in its warm embrace.




photo © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Others have recorded this song (Tom Russell, Dave Alvin), but for my ear, none better than the late Jim Ringer. He had the voice and the heart and the beat up face to bring it across like no one else. An Arkansas native, raised mainly in the farm valleys of California, a roustabout, Jim Ringer passed away at age 56 on St. Patrick's Day 1992.

ACTIVIST ~

ROSE STYRON


— a founding member of Amnesty International and to my mind an elegant spirit and mind at work, and for decades, for human rights and health, poetry, and the mother of four with her late husband the writer William Styron. The latter often over shadows the gifts of Rose Styron, but not really, since she gives fully to the work and now memory of her husband of over a half-century. On a hope, I once wrote to Rose Styron for some of her poems to include in the Origin sixth series I was collecting and editing in memory of its founder Cid Corman. She gave immediately and generously, without the usual latchings of a contract. I was a stranger tapping at the back door for a small handout, and she was just the type to answer and give generously. I trust we returned the favor.

PUSHKIN SQUARE

Pushkin

on his pedestal is sad.

Form Moscow to Chicago,

Paris to Damascus,

Capetown to Saigon,

lovers cry out to him

“Sing, sing for us, Pushkin!

The world is mad.

No one can hear our song.”

From Harlem to Havana,

Lima to Prague,

in snow-laced Leningrad

lovers cry

“Give us your land!

Fiercely we’ll guard and glorify

it as you taught us.

Trust us. Trust us.”

Lovers are never wrong.

The world is mad.

Through parks of iron,

forests of bone and chain,

lovers are crying,

“Find us, Pushkin, sing for us,

unhinge the door!

Our view is honor

but we miss

each other and the trees

and all those promises.

How long we’ve had

trysts to keep under your hand.

And lovers cry,

“Should we have known

there’d be no other chance?”
After such deaths as these

(the world is mad)

one love may meet

another, even dance

in Pushkin Square

but that love dare not be

his own.

Tears, stone,

stone tears

stone flowers spring

somewhere

from street to sky.

Pushkin

if you cannot sing for us

those stone years

sigh.

© rose styron
ORIGIN, sixth series
edited by bob arnold

charlie rose

WITH ME ~

A lovely tune played and sung by Clive Palmer & Robin Williamson, two of the founding members of The Incredible String Band. Palmer & Williamson teamed up as lads singing acoustic traditional folk songs in 1963 out of their native British Isles; by 1965 they added Mike Heron and became ISB with endless tribal soft clothing family band members, squabbles, and recordings to hold close to your heart. The two fellas here are still hard at work. Once a troubadour, always.

EARTH ~

Duncan McNaughton

Cook's Hill



The bus let him off at the end of Parish Road
he walked past our house every night of the week


it was a dry town, working men
who wanted a drink had to go down to The Falls


and some women, they all had to get the last bus
up Central Ave.


He's drunk, ain't he?
No, my mother said, he's not drunk.


He doesn't drink any more, my father
said, not like he used to. Once in a while


he'll take a drink but that's all.
He walks like a drunk.


No, my father said, Charlie used to be an alky
but he walks like that because he was burnt.


You can't see it, my mother said, unless you get close
to his hands, but his legs


and part of his body are burned. He
can't help but walk that way.


He fell asleep smoking, my father said, the mattress
caught fire. Murray saved his life.


Saved the house too.
That's what makes him limp so.


He's a nice man, my mother said. He was always
a nice man, even when he was drinking.


They both are, those two,
they don't bother anybody.





from Valparaiso
(Listening Chamber, 1995)

photo : yasni.co.uk


Down from his hometown of Boston, Massachusetts, Duncan McNaughton wrote his first poem in Provincetown in 1961. Fifty years later he's going strong. There seems a conscientious pacing and rhythm between books; I recommend each one. The Poetics Program at the New College of San Francisco well remembers his contribution, as well as other Bay area events, in Europe, and his work in the mimeo generation as editor of both Fathar and Mother.

EARTH ANGEL ~

IRA COHEN

(February 3, 1935- April 25, 2011)










Photo by Gerard Malanga

EARTH ~

Simon Cutts

Miss Crick's Workshop


amidst drawers

of baubles

for repair,



the pear

or pearl -

drops



of crystal

candle

chandelier










Bryan Broom's Room


the tubular

candlewick

bedspread



used as

curtains

gains



the condensed

weight of

bathwater










Anything may, with strict propriety

be called perfect

which perfectly answers

the purpose for which

it was made:



a packet of seeds










Today

I built

a Book:



began

the butternut

shoes



in May










in the folds

of fabrics



satchels of

aromatics



as sweet

flag strewn

between

pews










desert


buoyant pears

float



in a glass

bowl



as water

quells



dust from

the road










perfume invades

the dry blue

hydrangea



sheltered and

tethered by

the rockery










another paisley


a packet

of parsley's

curliness










Cabourg


the fine grass

of these dunes



scented &

crested by



the sound

of the sea



in a casement

window










the camouflaged

magpie



whose white

parts are



sky










the poem's

weight



as the braid

of a bird's



footpath

in the snow









from the shelves of

the alternative bookshop



the plans for

a dexion wheelbarrow





selected from SEEPAGES
SIMON CUTTS
The Jargon Society (1988)

SIMON CUTTS ~ poet, artist, and editor, mastermind, with Erica Van Horn, at Coracle Press over the last four decades where their pursuit has been the book and its mechanisms as a manifestation of the poem itself. They live in Ireland.

EARTH ~

Bascom Lamar Lunsford

March 21, 1882 - September 4, 1973


A North Carolina folklorist, lawyer, musician — what a cherished combination once upon a time!

Banjo and fiddler.

He first recorded this song the year my father was born, and then again in the late 40s.

Everyone of note has copied it, which is what you do in America to get ahead.

Just listen

thewildwood.wordpress.com
fuchsiastars.blogspot.com

READER ~

POETS CONVINCE US THAT ALL OUR CHILDHOOD REVERIES ARE WORTH STARTING OVER AGAIN

~Gaston Bachelard

film : © bob arnold

EARTH ~

Lance Henson

poem in july



water falls from the cup of a hand
late the moons silhouette behind clouds


wind in this hour
is the sound of a young girls dress


mist on the hair of her arms
her face sudden petal
in matchlight


trees cross the fields alone
windrows of new mown hay


a bird flies into her sleep
scent of rain


the wind pauses
knowing she is the sky





from Selected Poems 1970-1983
(Greenfield Press)

WHEN THIS BOOK APPEARED IN 1985 LANCE HENSON WAS A MEMBER OF THE CHEYENNE DOG SOLDIER WARRIOR SOCIETY AND LIVED ON A FARM WHERE HIS GRANDPARENTS RAISED HIM ON THE PLAINS.

photo: usao.edu

EARTH ~







FIVE ALARM


We saw first how the traffic was coming at us
Not right
Monday morning, a week of school vacation
And all this traffic, from where?
The closer we got to town, the more it appeared jumbled
Big pickup trucks and impatient drivers
Some frightened looks behind windshields
Then we saw the center of town was struck
A large fire on main street finally damped down
At the most elegant and historic section
Five floors, brick facade, slate roofing
Flames jumped for their lives for hours out the busted windows
Fire's devilish horns out the roof
Hysteria in the center of civilization
150 firefighters from three states were called in
Two million gallons of water was hosed
Firefighters were sent to the hospital
It was night time and a full moon was rising over our wooded hillsides
In the aftermath, in daylight, you could tell the different
Firefighters and towns by their different colored uniforms
Otherwise, all were equal all were spent
Water washed everywhere
Heavy smoke and water damage to all the stores on the bottom floor
This includes a thoughtful bath and kitchen boutique I went into once
An Asian craftsman, a Middle Eastern seller of fine delights, a restaurant that
Started as a bank where we obtained our house mortgage eons ago
Two shops at least that have just finished complete remodeling
Back to mud
And a legendary bookshop that shelved some of my books and much more
Mush
All that water used on the fire above---had to go somewhere---down
My wife and I walk up the startled main street closed to traffic
It now takes a state of emergency to find a town this quiet and humbled
Town folk walk dazed bewildered searching recalling sickened lost found
The closer we get to the building my wife holds me by the arm
Thirty years ago she worked here
When I look around I see behind us a young couple huddled, new to me
I don't know them but I do know them, she points high to
A blackened window for her companion's sake, and cries

A firefighter battled flames at a 5-alarm fire in the historic 59-unit Brooks House building Sunday in downtown Brattleboro, Vt.

photo : Jason Henske/ Brattleboro Fire Department via Associated Press

WITH ME ~

MACY GRAY

Born the year of the Human Be-In, standing at six feet, and with the stage name "Macy Gray" that has been said was swiped off a mailbox by the singer when she was six years old. The R&B singer and actress has five albums to her hard living and working name. Her first job was in her hometown of Canton, Ohio for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where she was fired for lateness. The mother of three. Despite disliking her own voice, we like it, raspy. Turn it up.

photo : kate peters

MOUTH ~







DONALD TRUMP


A big

motor

boat




spoiling




your

day

on




the lake








theperiscopegroup.com

EARTH ~

The Nameless Numbers: Counting Wolves, Counting Sheep

for Wolf 314F

“Through the centuries, we have projected onto the wolf

the qualities we most despise and fear in ourselves.”

—Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

They killed her, those bastards, she with no name except Wolf 314F. They killed her with Compound 1080, laced inside the leg meat of a dead deer. Of a sheep. Colorless salt, used as metabolic poison. Convulsions, dizziness, uncontrollable running. Vomiting, hyperextension of the limbs, unbearable pain. She died alone on a quiet Colorado road. Dirt. Ranch hands at the slack. Twenty-four miles north of Rifle. Picture that as you try to count yourself to sleep. Count the unlaced sheep populating your eye, the salted sheep dropped from planes that should make you want to die.

Let’s talk numbers. Let’s say the effectiveness of sodium fluoroacetate as a rodenticide and mammalian predacide was reported in 1942. Let’s talk science. Let’s say the number 1080 refers to the catalog name of the poison. Let’s say sodium fluoroacetate occurs naturally in at least 40 plants in Australia, Brazil, and Africa. That it’s so powerful, a teaspoon could kill 100 people. That it’s classified as a chemical weapon in France. In Spain. Count with me, repeat: 1942, 1080, 40, 100. 314F. Numbers say, Stick to the numbers. Forget her name. Let’s say one, two, buckle my knee. Shoo fly, don’t bother to bite this plague perfectly into us. Kick the canine bitch into a ditch, they say, where wolves can no longer whelp.

Okay, you bastards, let’s talk numbers. She had traveled through four states. Logged more than 1,000 miles from her Montana home. She had howled with five others from the Mill Creek Pack, had left Yellowstone, alone, to find a mate. She had nannied and licked three pups from new-birth blind into joyful uncoordinated tumbling toughs. She had precisely seven and a half whiskers on the muzzle of her snow-mount face.

Gray. 314F was gorgeous gray. Beautiful bark of the lovely dark. Moving in moonlight across snow. Shadow of a secret self. A cloud-covered moon across all that cold. So much is falling from the sky. Such lost sleep. So many pieces we count as we shake ourselves awake. The project entails distributing fluoroacetate-baited meat from the air. Sheep, deer, belly of the calf.

They killed her and she had no name. They killed her and she licked the salt. They killed her and she convulsed into yelps. They killed her with the meat of something dead. Sheep, sheep, they count the sheep. In bed. They are already dead themselves.

Numbers? You want to hold the entire painful equation? In your mouth? They shear the sheep and buy a wool shirt. Exhaust the hens and lay a college fund. Drive the cattle to market to lace the table with steak. Nothing is as simple as good and wrong, right and bad. Uncomplicated as addition adding up to subtraction. But poison, I say, is poison. Never ranch-worthy. Convulsions, always cruel.

Numbers? You want numbers? The numb numb numbing of primordial deep? Cut the sleep mask open into complete darkness. Count the sleep medicines moaning in the sink. Remember in your insomniatic sexual urge that each lamb jumping the gate can drop a wolf permanently dead.

They killed her, and she had no name. (I would have called her Elsa or Shadow.) They killed her, careful, on a Colorado road. They killed her in Rifle without a gun. They killed what was once a young tumbling pup. They killed the shadow of the shadow’s sleep. Alone. Elegant. Gray. They killed the lovely of the lovely dark. Shame on them. Shame. Shame shame shame on them. I give this to them, those bastards—dropping into their sleep this leg meat of words laced with cyanide, with strychnine, with 1080 grains of the cruelest salt of everlasting blame.

~ George Kalamaras

George Kalamaras is the author of many fine books of poetry, including The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2009) and Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008). His co-authored book with Alvaro Cardona-Hine, The Recumbent Galaxy, won C & R Press’s Open Competition and appeared the same year as Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees, a book of George’s poems with paintings by Cardona-Hine. George is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.

howlingforjustice.wordpress.com

EARTH ~

A GREEN MOUNTAIN IDYLL ~
POEMS FOR HAYDEN CARRUTH

Edited by Bob Arnold